During the pandemic, the federal government made school meals free for every student. That waiver expired in 2022. Since then, nine states have passed their own permanent programs to feed all public school students at no charge, regardless of family income.
Kate Carter
Under a new state law, Maryland's 24 school districts must adopt classroom AI policies by this fall, guided by recommendations the state education department just released. Some districts are already piloting tools.
Mary Johnson
If you are house-hunting around Chicago and trying to read the schools before you sign anything, here is the honest version. Illinois's strongest districts cluster in the affluent suburbs northwest and west of the city, and the gap between them and the big urban districts is real. Here is the ranking, by test scores, with the district-type traps spelled out.
Mary Johnson
Affluent families are pulling children out of conventional K-12 for microschools, learning pods, and AI-driven academies that compress academics and add life-skills time. The trend is real and growing. The outcome evidence is thin, and access still tracks wealth.
Arthur Chen
Magnet schools are free public schools with a specialized focus, and most of them admit students by lottery or by criteria like test scores and auditions. Here is the plain-English version of how the process works, what the weighted lottery really means, and the handful of moves that actually improve your kid's odds.
Mary Johnson
Florida released its 2025-26 school grades, with 76% of schools statewide earning an A or B and failing schools continuing to decline. Palm Beach, Martin, Indian River and St. Lucie counties all earned A district grades; Okeechobee earned a C.
Mary Johnson
The biggest "elementary" schools in the country aren't sprawling K-5 neighborhood buildings. They're K-8 academies and charter schools, plus a few districts that deliberately pack thousands of kids into single grade-band buildings. Here are the 13 largest, by NCES enrollment.
Kate Carter
A Georgia English teacher who said she was pushed out of her job over a private social media post about Charlie Kirk has reached a confidential settlement with the Oglethorpe County School District, ending a federal free-speech lawsuit.
Mary Johnson
A former counselor at Orange High School in Hillsborough, North Carolina, turned herself in and was charged with sex crimes involving students, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Office. She has not entered a plea.
Mary Johnson
California sets a course-based state minimum to earn a diploma, but your district almost certainly requires more, and the A-G pattern for UC and CSU is a separate thing entirely. Here is what the state actually mandates, what is changing this decade, and how to read your own district's rules.
Kate Carter
A fire gutted the 109-year-old Lincoln Avenue School on Milwaukee's south side. With the school year two months away, the district has to find a home for about 500 students and dozens of staff.
Mary Johnson
Cobb County enrolls about 116,600 public school students across 129 schools, but the county name hides two facts that matter more than any ranking: it holds two separate districts, and its highest-scoring high schools cluster on the east side. Here is what the data actually says.
Kate Carter
The nation's second-largest school district approved strict new limits on classroom screen time, banning it for early grades and capping it for everyone else. The rules phase in from August 2026 through January 2027.
Mary Johnson
If you are house-hunting in San Diego County and trying to read the schools before you read the listings, here is the district picture in plain numbers. The north-coast corridor and Poway lead, the giant San Diego Unified is a coin-flip that depends entirely on the school, and the south and east skew higher-poverty.
Mary Johnson
FuturEdge Charter Academy in North Las Vegas may lose its charter after defaulting on the bond it used to buy its building. Here is what is happening to its 318 families, and what every charter-school parent should take from it.
Mary Johnson
Parents look at a high school of 4,000 and a high school of 600 and assume one is obviously better. The evidence is more interesting than either instinct. Size shapes outcomes, but mostly through belonging and climate, and it predicts far less than how a school is run.
Arthur Chen
Most "best counties" lists are just income rankings wearing a lab coat. Rank by which counties beat the test scores their poverty level predicts, and the leaderboard is led by Texas border counties, not wealthy suburbs.
Kate Carter
Wake County, North Carolina runs one of the 15 largest school systems in the country, and it does it as a single countywide district. Here is what the enrollment, demographics, and test-score data say about Raleigh and its fast-growing western suburbs.
Kate Carter
We ranked America's public high schools by a Simpson diversity index, and the leaders are not where most people guess. The most diverse high school in the country sits in Anchorage, Alaska, and the rest cluster in Puget Sound, Hawaii, the Las Vegas valley, and Northern California.
Arthur Chen
You do not always have to move to change your child's public school. Open enrollment lets families apply to schools outside their zone, but the rules vary by state and the transportation catch trips up a lot of parents. Here is how it actually works.
Mary Johnson
